His eyes gleamed in the twilight as he swiped a thumb over her swollen, crimson lips.
She took an inhale as he claimed her mouth again.
This time with a slow, worshipful intensity that made her knees buckle.
He pulled her flush against the heat of his sinewed chest and whispered into the shell of her ear.
His timbre reverberated through her, sparking a visible shiver he tracked with his fingertips.
‘Woman, all we need is a little more time to explore what we have,naam?’
She gave a slow nod. ‘Sawa, let’s take the time until my transport gets here. And I mean really lean into it.’
He chuckled, pressing a kiss to her forehead while they remained fused as the moon and stars ignited above them.
There were so many paths to navigate, and multiple ways for their trajectory to splinter, Idan thought.
It seemed every star in the galaxy needed to synchronize for their tomorrows to become a shared reality. Yet as he held her, Idan prayed for that alignment, regardless of what came.
40 KLICKS FROM LATTAYA
The mountain winds shrieked against the fortress’s stone walls, a desolate sound that only emphasized Ty Si’Rhix’s total isolation from the world below.
Inside his private suite, however, insulated and warm, Ty snorted an ivory powder from a table, sniffed, and wiped his nose.
He sat back with a contented sigh, floating in akokodream, lost in a fantasy where he was the ultimate king of his castle.
He’d every reason to be gloating. Business was exploding.
His mines in Upper Lattaya and Aqqari were producing xentium by the ton, crushing their usual quotas ten times over.
In the orbit above Galicia, his privateer fleets had just hauled in a massive merchant score. The interception of a cache of diamonds meant to be delivered to the jewelers’ districts of Enia was a mighty fine payday.
He sank into a plush, velvet-lined chair, sampling Sartixian caviar on warm, buttery blinis with thick cream.
He washed them down with a glass of ‘Crown of Tansinia’, a vintage champagne so rare that a single bottle cost more than a provincial skiff.
To cap it all off, a transport ship packed with elite guests was already on a flight path towards his castle hideaway for a weekend of debauched partying.
The only blot on his worldview was a being named Idan, a wild-haired glitch in the system with powers that defied logic.
However, Ty dealt only in solutions.
He tapped a button on his gold-plated comms unit, reaching out to the most feared liquidator for hire in the sector.
The signal bridged the expanse to the Shattered Moons of Veridian, to a derelict orbital station calledThe Gallowglass.
The holo screen resolved, revealing an Allorian man.
His face, augmented with implants, was cruel, lined, and spotted.
His hair was a shock of bleached, wire-thin strands plastered to his skull, and a cybernetic visor glowed crimson over his left eye.
He who wore all red and sat surrounded by the haze of black-market cigar smoke and the gleam of illegal tech.
Korsen ‘The Reaper’ Vane was a notorious hatchet man, a maniacal ghost as told by eyewitnesses, the few who still breathed to share his infamy.
He dabbled in ‘Finality Contracts.’
